A contemporary anarcho-socialist woman

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Ezra Klein

We’ve seen a big jump in the poverty rate in the past two years, of course, but we also saw a mild increase in the years before that. Between 2001 and 2007, the poverty rate increased from 11.7 percent to 12.5 percent. But the economy grew in every one of those years. This was the first period since we began keeping records in which the economy expanded but poverty went up — usually, economic expansions bring the poverty rate down. It’s more evidence that the pre-crisis “normal” was an economy that wasn’t working very well for a lot of people, even when it was growing.